the final curtain

I rewrote the epilogue to august chagrin yesterday, and I'm pleased with it. It achieved exactly what I'd hoped for, and I know this because I read it to S and he had exactly the reaction I wanted.

It starts out as a true-life account of how I ended up in Austin -- on my way to the West Coast, stopped in Texas while my grandmother died, decided not to go to the West Coast because of the cost of living, came to Austin for a meditation retreat -- and then shifts slightly into fiction shortly after my grandmother passes away and I move to Austin.

I meet a woman at the Buddhist center here; she is Amitodana Metta Sutta, and she doesn't really exist, she is a character in the book. She is the person who connects me to all of the other characters in the book, the entire story, by giving me a box of writings she has been holding onto for ten or more years. In the box are some letters she wrote as well as journals, plays and stories by the person who became Randy Reardon in my "retelling" of the story, as well as ideas for performance art pieces by the title character.

Supposedly. It's all fiction, really, and it has an exciting effect I think, taking the reader out of the fiction of the bulk of the novel to the possibility of it having been non-fiction by using non-fiction from my own life, then fictionalizing part of that as well. It works, I think, and manages to stir up the story enough to keep it cloudy in the reader's mind, not in a "Huh?" way, but more of as an opening for possibilities. Did this really happen? Are these people real?

Here's the last paragraph:
So I present this as a work of fiction with nothing to back up the facts otherwise. Ami (not her real name) was pleased with the outcome, and truly that was my only goal as I got involved n working on it. The fact that you're reading this right now means that her dream was realized, and the life of this special person lives on.